I've checked the Jolla's Sailfish OS devel mailinglist archives today as I haven't been there for a long time. There are now 60-70 posts a month. Can it be any worse? Just to compare, when the Jolla phone came out there were up to 1000 posts a month.

In July someone asked again about support for paid apps. No answer at all.

For someone (anyone) to buy them so that the founders at least get something out of it, before they go bankrupt and have to close shop.

How convenient that Nokia has a lot of money and will try to come back to the mobile phone business.

It was already planned from the very first day the company was created. The company is called Jolla for christ sake which means Dinghy boat, a small sailing boat. This is metaphor for the sinking ship Nokia and the workers had to flee to Jolla (essentially a life boat but calling it that would have been too obvious). You can't live on a Jolla for ever and you need to be picked up by a large ship again.

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For someone (anyone) to buy them so that the founders at least get something out of it, before they go bankrupt and have to close shop.

That's for sure. The question I've been asking repeatedly for years, however, is if it wouldn't be much easier for them to find someone (anyone) willing to buy them if their OS had a vivid ecosystem and tens of times more native applications. Any signs of life, that is.

I've just started re-porting my apps to Sailfish OS once again. The size of Sailfish OS userbase does not discourage me. Porting is easy and fast, so why not do it. What DOES seriously discourage me, however, is that I still can't sell my apps. Quite possibly, that single thing alone keeps hundreds (or maybe thousands) of developers away from this platform. Those former Symbian and MeeGo developers are still there somewhere, they still know how to code in Qt and they still have their Symbian and MeeGo projects in their drawers. Within just days they could port them to Jolla, if they only could sell them then. Or else, they just don't see any reasons to do it. Nor do I, actually.

So how expensive or difficult it would be to finally add to the Jolla store some sort of payment support? As I wrote many times, as long ago as in 2001 I had a Symbian app store on this very site. Adding credit card payments to it took HOURS - merely signing an agreement with a company processing online payments and then creating a few PHP scripts to handle it.

So I don't buy the Jolla s**t that it is "tougher than they thought".

The very same way I just can't comprehend why the SDK is in such a pitiful state, with still all the bugs present, still the same Qt libs missing, no support for the Tablet they're already taking preorders for, etc. As if no one touched it since 2014. How difficult it can be to update it? Two days of one man's work in total?

This really could have been an N9 successor, with not much less units sold. But they really did everything to minimize its chances.

Those 1000 posts a month on their mailinglist in late 2013 shows that the interest for their product among developers was there. Less than 60 posts a month in 2015 clearly shows that they simply SCARED AWAY everyone but just A FEW die-hard geeks.

MeowTseDong wrote:

How convenient that Nokia has a lot of money and will try to come back to the mobile phone business.

It was already planned from the very first day the company was created. The company is called Jolla for christ sake which means Dinghy boat, a small sailing boat. This is metaphor for the sinking ship Nokia and the workers had to flee to Jolla (essentially a life boat but calling it that would have been too obvious). You can't live on a Jolla for ever and you need to be picked up by a large ship again.

This still doesn't explain why they do everything to scare away all developers from this platform. Even if it is really planned that Nokia will pick them up again and use their OS, it certainly would be much better for Nokia to pick it up with an army of developers already familar with it and ready to develop for it since day one, rather than a completely dead platform with the number of developers you can count with one hand's fingers.

Also, if Dillon knew that it is all about waiting for Nokia's come back, why would he leave? He was the founder, and the frontman, the only person commonly associated with Jolla even by complete outsiders. But he just left, without even saying goodbye.

Usually, the reason for this is that there are disagreements about the direction of the company.

But you just wrote that the direction of the company is to reunite with Nokia. So are you suggesting that Dillon was against it, or that Dillon was pro it and everyone else was against it? Considering that he actually founded Jolla (and you said that it was known from the beginning that it was just to wait for Nokia to come back) would it mean that Dillon has recently changed his goals and no longer wanted to reunite with Nokia, or that everyone else (but Dillon) changed their minds and no longer want to reunite with Nokia? If the latter, then (considering that it was Dillon who left) it would mean that we should not hold our breath for this partnership.

I mean, if to reunite with Nokia has been this company's main goal right from the start, I can't see how anything else could be of sufficient importance for the company's founder and frontman to leave like this...

It is possible that they had some investors that put up some crazy demands and he has given up trying to do the right thing. Maybe they handled economy and legal stuff as an afterthought in the beginning and has suffered from it ever since.

On the technical side some details are more fun to implement than others, and I think a good management is needed to shift the focus to also do the boring things that are important. It's also important to some times just make a decision. If there are 3 ways to do one thing, and all of them are acceptable, but non of them get implemented because they can't agree which way is best, then the project will suffer from it. It would then be better to have a management who could just pick one of them and let the people who lost that argument win in another discussion later. Every employee should feel accepted and valued, but no one can win every time. If the differences are too large, however, then someone leaving may be the best option, although please don't read this as if I think it is a good or bad idea he is leaving as I have no idea how things are inside Jolla.

If a company start out with a relaxed policy, then I think it may be hard to enforce things more later. I don't think it is very unlikely that Jolla started that way and has suffered from it ever since. While rules can be restrictive, they can also help avoid personal conflicts.

and you said that it was known from the beginning that it was just to wait for Nokia to come back

So they founded their company on the bet that WP would not work out? And the bet that after such a desaster Nokia woud want to try again. Two bets, that is what it would mean. Hardly a sound business strategy.

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